Though you may have played Marathon on the Mac, Bungie didn’t make a name for itself until it introduced gamers to one of console gaming’s first cohesive online experiences, Halo. Whether or not you ever jumped on the Halo bandwagon — or ended up referring to the series as “teh Haloz” — Bungie’s popularity exploded. Eventually, the team finished up with Halo and moved onto its next project, Destiny, which, yes, looks very much like Halo. Despite the space-armor-clad first-person shooter similarities, publisher Activison is hoping that Bungie can replicate Halo’s success, and to help nudge the game toward that success, the company has made it rain half a billion dollars all over the upcoming shooter.
CEO of Activision, Bobby Kotick, made it known that the company is putting $500 million behind Destiny, perhaps hoping to get out from under the thumb of its own shooter, Call of Duty. Activision has also sealed a deal to publish Destiny for an entire decade. As far as anyone can tell, this half-a-billion figure would make Destiny the priciest video game of all time. To compare, Rockstar spent $265 million on Grand Theft Auto V, which, at the time, was an almost offensive amount of money to go into making a single piece of media.
If that $500 million figure is actually true (it includes everything from development to retail packaging), Activision would have to sell around 15 million copies — at the full, $60 retail price — of Bungie’s new game in order to break even. Considering Bungie is behind the title, and Halo is still popular today, the game actually has a shot at reaching that level of popularity.
Destiny is scheduled to release on September 9 of this year.
via:geek
